Friday, June 29, 2018

Earlier this month, construction began on the second, now shockingly rectilinear, office tower at Reston Station. It's unusual for buildings of this size to be constructed on spec (the mauvescraper that may someday be Reston's tallest has been approved for years but is awaiting a "trophy" tenant before breaking ground). Comstock may have been betting the first Reston Station parallelogram that has sat mostly vacant since it was completed was a shoe-in for Nestle's U.S. headquarters (which instead chose Urban Hellhole Reston Is Destined To Become Minus the Proximity to DC Arlington), but now they're going forward with a second massive building, estimated at $95 million, with no signed tenants?

[Comstock CEO and founder Christopher] Clemente admitted to being a little "crazy" to start the second building but was confident there will be strong demand once it is complete, due largely to the facility's location near Metro.

"There is no office building on the Silver Line that is closer to Metro than the one we are about to start," Clemente told me in an interview. "We're doing it based on demand we see in the market and the activity we see in the [Dulles] Toll Road corridor."

He noted that it will take some time to build the parking structure under the new building, giving the developer roughly a year before it must commit to vertical construction of the office building.

Looking even further ahead, Comstock said it expects to begin construction next year on the third office building: a 250,000-square-foot tower called 1902 Reston Metro Plaza. The total price tag for that project is $125 million.

The Road from Nowhere was slipped in to the Comprehensive Plan surreptitiously, and now we have learned that the County has been planning for years to take over a portion of the fourth hole of the course for a 1 to 4-acre storm water d retention “pond."

Nothing to see here, kids. Just an additional water feature to add a little challenge for those hordes of up-and-coming millennial golfers!

County officials planning for a golf course-free future while publicly professing the intent to keep it open space? Now that's crazy, the end.

I looked up definitions of retention and detention "ponds" or basins: Detention Basin - "Detention basins are storm water best management practices that provide general flood protection and can also control extreme floods such as a 1 in 100-year storm event.[2] The basins are typically built during the construction of new land development projects including residential subdivisions or shopping centers. The ponds help manage the excess urban runoff generated by newly constructed impervious surfaces such as roads, parking lots and rooftops." - source: wikipediaReston should not lose recreational open space due to the major planned developments up hill.